Transport for all

This, the most populous city in America, is the only place in the country where a majority of people don’t have cars — which means most of the 8 million New Yorkers move about using government-owned subways, buses and government-regulated for-hire vehicles, from yellow taxis to Uber and the like.

Eternally on the outside looking in are the more than 100,000 among us who rely on wheelchairs.

This, despite the fact that the federal Americans With Disabilities Act, mandating fair treatment for people who can’t get around on two feet, became the law of the land in 1990.

While every local bus is wheelchair-accessible, the subways and Ubers are not. Neither are the majority of cabs.

That’s just wrong and counter to the spirit, if not the letter, of the law. The public agencies that oversee our public transit system, the MTA and the city Taxi and Limousine Commission, would never permit overt discrimination against people due to sex or race or religion or sexual orientation, but it’s the norm for people with disabilities.

Nobody is saying that means every single subway station in a cash-strapped, delay-plagued system must get an immediate retrofit to include elevators to every platform, damn the cost.

But the way things are is just plain unacceptable. Only a quarter of the 472 stations have elevators — a number that has taken decades to get to and which isn’t going to get any bigger.

Of the stations that do have elevators, maintenance is spotty to shoddy, which means people in wheelchairs are routinely left high and dry.

The MTA can’t even manage to provide timely and reliable data on its website about which elevators are broken, leaving people who depend upon them stranded and frustrated beyond belief.

How can it be that platform countdown clocks and web-based train data will be in place for the whole system by year’s end, accurately locating at each moment more than 8,000 moving trains daily, but the system’s leaders cannot say with precision which of the 247 elevators aren’t moving?

There’s an obvious place to get at least some of the money to install more elevators and improve the ones already there: The atrociously terrible network of wheelchair-accessible street vehicles known as Access-A-Ride.

Those white vans, which are chronically late and send passengers on circuitous shared rides that take them from point A to point B through points X, Y and Z, cost the system — meaning, the taxpayer and riding public — $82 per ride. That’s good money thrown right down the sewer.

Here, there’s some positive news: MTA President Pat Foye is working on reform. The solution has long been known: Dump the white vans and let each user take an accessible taxi, Uber, Lyft, etc., making it cheaper and more efficient.

Foye started a pilot program for 200 folks on Wednesday. Make it systemwide, and soon.

Which brings us to the last piece. Taxi and Limousine Commission Chairwoman Meera Joshi has done good work pushing to get 50% of the yellow taxi fleet accessible by 2020.

Good, though should be better; the ADA says any van operated as a taxi (like the widely used Nissan NV-200) must take wheelchairs.

As for the increasingly popular hail-by-app cars, the TLC must very soon vote to require all those services to dispatch a minimum percentage of their rides using accessible vehicles. Joshi should simultaneously let Uber and the others pursue an experiment they proposed last year, to form a consortium to provide accessible rides.

The goal is equivalent service. If a standard Uber is a five-minute wait, the wait for an accessible Uber must be in that ballpark. Every time.

Getting around is a right. Treat it like one.